What the Sister Knows
Chapter thirty-three
Mandy
Somebody has put a blanket around my shoulders. I don’t know who. It’s grey and it smells like a truck, and I’m holding it closed at my throat with one hand and my clutch in the other, and I’m standing on the wrong side of Michigan Avenue watching a hotel not burn down.
That’s the strange part. It looks fine. There’s smoke coming out of a vent at street level in a lazy grey rope and a lot of very loud machinery, and four hundred people in evening dress standing on the pavement like the world’s most confused wedding, and the building itself just sits there being a building.
Whatever is happening is happening underneath it, in some room none of us have ever seen, and men I have been drinking wine near for two hours are down there dealing with it in their good shoes.
I’ve been looking for Sterling for eleven minutes. I find him on the fourth pass, and I only find him because I know the shape of his shoulders.
He’s in a doorway about halfway down the block with a coat on over his dress shirt that clearly belongs to somebody four inches wider, and he’s putting his hand out to people coming out of a stairwell, one after another, saying something to each of them that I can’t hear.
There’s a young guy next to him who keeps looking at him instead of at the door.
I could get closer. There’s a gap between an ambulance and a ladder truck and I could be over there in twenty seconds.
I don’t. He’s working. I’ve spent a month learning what it costs him to be the person in that doorway, and I’m not going to be the thing that pulls him out of it.
So I stand on my side of the street, and I watch him do the job, and I think: that’s it.
That’s what I’ve been trying to name for three weeks.
He isn’t a rescue. He’s a man in a doorway counting people, and I have been so busy being one of the people that I never once stood far enough back to see him.
“Mandy.”
I don’t have to turn around.
There’s a specific way Derek says my name. It has a little downward turn on the end, like the answer is already agreed and he’s only saying it aloud as a courtesy.
He’s crossed the street. Of course he has. There is a working fire in a four-star hotel and Derek Marx has walked through it the way he walks through everything, and his coat is over his arm, and he isn’t even slightly out of breath.
“You’re shaking,” he says.
“It’s forty degrees and I’m wearing a blanket somebody found in a truck.”
“Come and sit in the car. It’s on Delaware. I’ve got the heater going.”
“No, thank you.”
He does the thing with his mouth, the patient one. “Mandy.”
“Derek, there’s a fire.”
“There’s a laundry room with a problem and about six hundred people standing in the street being told to stay off their phones,” he says.
“It’s over. You just haven’t been told yet.
” And he’s right, which is the thing about Derek.
He is so often right about the small stuff, and he has spent years using that as collateral on the large stuff.
Behind him, a fifth engine comes up Michigan with its air horn going, and neither of us says anything until it’s past.
“Say it, then,” I tell him. “Whatever it is you wanted to say inside. You’ve come across four lanes for it.”
“All right.” He shifts his coat to the other arm. “I want you to come and work for us.”
That is not what I was braced for.
“Not for me,” he says quickly, reading my face, because he has always been able to read my face.
“Not with me. Bellamy Kwon, on twelve. They’re rebuilding the entire brand from the studs and they have been looking for six months for someone who can do what you do, and I gave them your name last week and they came back inside a day.
It’s a real offer, Mandy. Senior. Their own floor.
Better than the New York number, and you’d sleep in your own bed. ”
The wind comes off the lake and up the avenue and goes straight through the blanket.
“Why,” I say.
“Because you’re good and they’re stupid not to have you.”
“Derek.”
“And because I would like to be in a position where you occasionally have to be in the same building as me,” he says, “and I am aware of how that sounds, and I have decided to say it anyway.”
And there it is, and I have to hand it to him, because it’s the best offer he has ever made me.
It’s not the town car and it’s not the ring and it’s not a lecture about stability.
It’s a good job I would be genuinely excellent at, handed over by a man who is being, for possibly the first time in three years, honest about what he wants out of it.
Two months ago I would have taken it. Not the man. The job. I’d have taken the job and told myself the man was incidental, and eighteen months later I’d have been sitting in a restaurant on Randolph explaining to somebody that it was complicated.
“No,” I say.
He doesn’t flinch. He tilts his head slightly, waiting for the rest of the sentence, because in Derek’s experience no has always been the opening position.
“That’s it,” I say. “That’s the whole answer. No.”
“Mandy, you haven’t even,”
“For two years I mistook your certainty for security.” My voice comes out steadier than I expect.
“I thought that because you always knew exactly what I should want, you must be the only person who could give it to me. And I spent two years feeling like I was failing at a life I never actually picked, and thinking the fact that it made me miserable was ingratitude. Because you’d built it.
And it was a very good life. And who was I to be unhappy in it. ”
“That’s not,”
“I’m not finished.” I don’t raise my voice.
I don’t need to. “What you call stability is control. You didn’t want a partner.
You wanted something you could polish and put on a shelf, something that fitted into your life without making any noise.
You love the performance of love. You are extremely good at it.
You have never once actually looked at me. ”
Something moves behind his eyes. For a second there’s a person in there.
“And the job is the same offer,” I say. “It’s just wearing a suit.
It’s you deciding what I should want and then arranging it for me before I’ve been asked.
You’ve never in your life said, what do you think, Mandy.
Not once. You say, I’ve spoken to somebody, I’ve had a word, I’ve put your name in.
And then you wait for me to be grateful. ”
“I was trying to help you.”
“I know. That’s the sad part. I don’t think you know the difference.”
The horn on the ladder truck goes and a crew moves past us at a jog, and Derek steps back to let them through, automatically, politely, and I watch him do it and feel absolutely nothing.
“He’s a firefighter,” Derek says at last, and it comes out smaller than he meant it to.
“He’s a paramedic and a firefighter and he’s sixty feet away and he hasn’t looked over here once, because there are people in that stairwell,” I say.
“Do you want to know the difference between you and him? He’d have hated hearing what I just said.
He would have argued with me about it for an hour. He’d have asked me what I thought.”
Derek looks at the far side of the street for a moment. He is a proud man and I have just taken something off him in public, and I brace for the last swipe, because there is always a last swipe.
It doesn’t come.
“Right,” he says. He puts his coat on. He takes his time about the collar. “For what it’s worth, the Bellamy Kwon thing stands. Call them or don’t. I won’t be involved.”
“Thank you.”
“And Mandy.” He’s already turning. “You never used to interrupt me.”
Which is, I think, the closest thing to an apology I am ever going to get from Derek Marx, and I decide, standing in a blanket on Michigan Avenue, that it is enough.
He goes off toward Delaware. I don’t watch him get there.
I stand for a while after that, and I wait to feel triumphant, and I don’t. What I feel is tired, and cold, and unreasonably hungry, and something underneath all of it that I eventually identify as quiet. It’s the first quiet I’ve had in my own head since the morning of the fire.
Sixty feet away a man in the wrong coat puts his hand out for somebody else coming down a stairwell.
“That was well done,” somebody says beside me.
There’s a woman there in a black cocktail dress, holding two paper cups, with dark curly hair pulled up onto the top of her head that I have absolutely seen before and cannot place.
“I’ve been standing behind you for the whole thing,” she says. “I want to be honest about that rather than have you work it out later. Also I made no attempt to leave.”
“Right.”
“Here.” She holds out one of the cups. “There’s a woman doing coffee out of a hotel urn on a trolley by the taxi rank. It’s terrible, but it’s hot.”
I take it because my hands are freezing. “Thank you. I’m sorry, do I,”
“No,” she says. “We’ve never met. I’ve seen about forty photographs of you, which is an unfair advantage and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.” She puts her hand out. “Becca Hayes.”
“Oh,” I say.
“Yes.”
“You’re supposed to be in Providence.”
“I was in Providence.” She blows across her coffee.
“Then my brother stopped answering his phone for four days, so I swapped a rotation with a creeper named Todd and got on a plane, and I have been sleeping on his guest bed for three nights waiting for him to say a true sentence out loud. Tonight I got dragged to a fire in a cocktail dress. This is a good week, actually. I’ve seen worse. ”
I laugh. It comes out wrong, more like a cough.
“Sorry,” I say. “It’s been.”
“I know what it’s been.” She looks across the street, at the doorway, at the shape of her brother’s shoulders in a borrowed coat. “He hasn’t looked over here once, has he.”
“No.”
“He knows exactly where you are, though.” She says it without any particular emphasis. “He’s known where you are since the second you came out of that stairwell. He’s just decided he isn’t allowed to do anything about it.”